Notes from Bologna

Wherein our intrepid
reporter sets out to capture the local flavor of a centuries-old
city, and its decades-old American center for international
studies
at 11 Via Belmeloro.

On a Saturday night
in
Bologna, I was strolling down Via Rizzoli when I came upon a
bookstore. I walked in, pulled from the shelf a manual on
essential
English for Italian travelers, and found this: The last time
I
had a woman was 22 years ago, in the Crimea.

Your guess
is
as good as mine.

I suspect that such encounters with oddness
were part of what C. Grove Haines had in mind when he founded the
SAIS-affiliated Hopkins Bologna Center, which celebrated its 40th
anniversary in late April. If SAIS were to properly train
students
in international relations, those students would profit from
exposure to the marvelous quirkiness of the world and the
cultures
that must share it. Haines, who had been the first full-time
professor at SAIS and served many years as the first director of
the Bologna Center, called the center the "first graduate
institution emphasizing regional studies to be transplanted to
the
area emphasized by its studies." It began its inaugural year of
instruction with about 50 students, two of them female, and eight
faculty members. It was housed at the University of Bologna.
Today,
the center has its own building near the university. There are
now
seven resident and 30 visiting professors, who teach about 150
graduate and undergraduate students, more than half of them
female,
from 30 or so different countries.

Most students are working
toward a master of arts in international relations, which
requires
a year in Bologna and a second year at SAIS in Washington. In
Italy
they study languages, economics, diplomacy, contemporary history,
international law, politics, foreign policy, and European
culture.
The center's present director, Robert H. Evans, hopes they learn
a
lot from simply mingling with each other. "The center teaches
what
tolerance is," Evans says. "You put 30 nationalities together,
each
with its point of view, and by the end of the year each person
has
learned to listen to another point of view, and ponder
it,
and even agree with it."

In David Ellwood's Wednesday
afternoon
class "America and the Modernization of Europe," Ellwood, a
professorial lecturer from Britain, holds off on a discussion of
postwar reconstruction to cover another topic: the Oscars. The
day
after Forrest Gump garnered its collection of little
gold
statues, the Italian press apparently had a field day using the
movie and the awards ceremony to stereotype Americans and
American
culture. With his students, Ellwood discusses some of the press
clippings they've brought in about the Oscars, teaching them to
recognize stereotypes, and to think beyond them. They talk about
European concerns over the continuing influx of American culture
-
- Bologna has Foot Locker stores and McDonald's, and even Pizza
Hut
is about to open in Italy - - and Ellwood explains why they
should
be aware of the politicized use of the phrase cultural
imperialism, and skeptical of its intellectual validity.

Most of the center's students are in their mid '20s. About
half
are Americans; the class of '94 included people from Australia,
Brazil, Bulgaria, Japan, Lebanon, the Philippines, Serbia, and
Turkey. Evans has noticed that the Germans tend to be among the
oldest, coming to SAIS after completing law degrees, while the
Brits tend to be the youngest, matriculating straight out of
undergraduate institutions. Most Americans have worked for a year
or two after receiving a bachelor's degree before they show up on
the center's doorstep.

The students are a sociable lot,
mingling
freely, united across nationalities by a sense of
we're-all-in-this-together. Articulate, amiable, and confident,
they seem looser, less driven, more cheerful than typical Hopkins
students. They congregate in the first-floor coffee bar, which
dishes up salads, sandwiches, baked goods, and a steady stream of
espresso and cappuccino. (They'll be happy to find out next year
that Washington D.C. now seems to have an espresso bar on every
corner.)

The center's coffee bar is open to the public, and
students from the nearby University of Bologna, which predates
the
center by about 900 years, like to go there for cheap eats and
the
chance to meet Americans. The center also opens its library to
the
public; the institution is eager for the Bolognese to
view
it as another part of the city's culture, not an island of
America
plunked down at 11 Via Belmeloro. The local Italian press greeted
the founding of the institution in 1955 with warnings about this
new danger to Italian independence and culture - - that cultural
imperialism thing again. Public affairs director Linda Marion
still
shakes her head over how local journalists insist on portraying
the
center as an American enclave, despite its international student
body and faculty.

Several of those local journalists and press
photographers are in evidence on a Thursday evening as the 1995
Bologna-Claremont Monetary Conference convenes. The opening
address
is by Eric Roll, who is president of the investment bank SG
Warburg
in London, and is known formally as Lord Roll of Ipsden. The
conference boasts four Nobel laureates in economics, and among
those attending Lord Roll's speech is a politician who would like
to be Italy's next prime minister. The politician makes sure the
photographers snap him as he stands amidst all the Nobel winners
and other intellectual luminaries.

The next afternoon, Lord
Roll
dozes in the warm auditorium as the conferees discuss the new
disequilibrium in the world economy. The roundtable discussion
attracts a full house of journalists, scholars, and students from
the center. Many of the students are bound for careers in
economics
or finance, and today they learn that not even a quartet of Nobel
laureates is sure why the world's economies do what they do.

Bologna is a lovely place. Miles of porticoes shelter its
pedestrians. Narrow medieval streets seldom go more than 10 yards
without a crook or a curve. Many of the buildings have been faced
with a muted orange stucco; in the afternoon light, the city
center
seems to glow as if lit from within by candles. The men favor
black
leather jackets, the women short skirts and high heels, and
everyone carries a cellular phone. At a Sunday soccer match
(Bologna 2, Allessandria 1), I hear beep-beep-beep.
It's
the guy next to me, taking a call.

The center's Americans
enjoy
their immersion in an unfamiliar culture, but find, here and
there,
bits of home. There's the local McDonald's (which serves beer),
Coca-Cola in the center's coffee bar, and the International
Herald Tribune and major U.S. publications in the library.
On
Friday evening, Arlene Binuya, the center's head of student
affairs, and her fiancé, Tom Murray (SAIS '92), host a
small
wine-and-cheese party for a few faculty and administrative
friends
on the terrace of their apartment, overlooking the Piazza San
Stefano. Murray announces that he's found a cheese shop that
carries cheddar, important news if you're an American with a
taste
for burritos. He notes that the shop's owner sold him tonight's
Stilton, but made him purchase some Italian cheeses to go with
it.

Many students use their stay in Bologna as an opportunity for
other travel in Europe. In Ellwood's class, Alia Malek '96
relates
the story of her first - - and she insists her last - - 18-hour
bus
ride from Prague. After class, Malek learns that Hopkins
Magazine offers editorial internships, and proves she's a
Hopkins student by reaching into her book bag and whipping out an
up-to-date résumé.

In September, this crop of
master's students will come to Washington for their second year
of
instruction. I'll be curious to see if the Europeans and other
non-Americans respond to Washington as the Americans responded to
Bologna. Some of them I'll recognize from the time I spent in
their
midst at the center. As for those I didn't meet, I'll know who
they
are when I hear them say, "The last time I had a woman was 22
years
ago, in the Crimea."